I tried but eventually fell out with Windows 7 Media Center due to its need to control everything I added to the library not to mention the lack of speed and poor DNLA connectivity.
DNLA is the standard now used by Sony, Samsung and many other TV/Amp and home electronics manufacturers to bring a common connunication to different devices. I have to say that the idea is superb but up until now the execution has been poor. The majority of DNLA devices only support pictures and music. Very few support streaming of movies and even at that most will require the streaming software/hardware to recode or encode the output to suit the hardware being played on. This is excatly where my idea of a media free house fell flat on its face.
The majority of media streaming software is hard to use, clumsy and unreliable. To be fair the majority seems to be beta software as there is no real one company dedicating real effort to this technology. That is until I stumbled upon Mezzmo.
Mezzmo is a DNLA streaming package by a company called Conceiva that does not claim to be all things to all men but does by far offer the best DNLA streaming experience that I have found. It is very simple to install and to use. Adding a folder to the library is easy and you can even control which devices on your network are allowed access to the content. This is done via a rather nifty 'Connected Devices' window that quickly shows you which devices are requesting connection to your files. Great for stopping kids getting to adult content and also great at stopping their friends browsing your familys media
Im running this on a Windows 7 64bit server and so far the encoding has been very reliable and fast. I only noticed a few seconds delay when asking to fast forward (it takes a little time to skip forward and then start encoding again).
All in all this is an excellent little piece of software and although I am still using the free trial, I now think I will pay the $29 to get all the features.
The next stage is to build a little microATX pc for using the Internet/PC on the main TV.
Check out their website for more details.
http://www.conceiva.com/default.asp
EDIT :
I have just also discovered that it will import my iTunes library and make it available to the TV. Cool.
